Internet Explorer 10 preview to hit Windows 7 in mid-November

But there's no ETA for the final version.

Windows 7 users wanting to upgrade to Internet Explorer 10 will have to wait a bit longer. Microsoft announced today that it will be shipping a preview of Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 in mid-November. There's no public timeline for the release of the final version; delivery of that version will depend on "developer and customer feedback."

On the face of it, the delay is a little surprising. Internet Explorer 10 is included with Windows 8, and since Windows 8 was completed back in August, clearly Internet Explorer 10 must in some sense be finished. The extra time required for Windows 7 may be due to underlying platform differences—Windows 8 supports Direct3D 11.1, compared to 11.0 on Windows 7, for example. So if Internet Explorer 10 depends on Direct3D 11.1 features, either that dependence has to be removed, or Direct3D 11.1 has to be ported to Windows 7.

This would not be unprecedented. Internet Explorer 9 depended on features such as Direct2D and DirectWrite that were built in to Windows 7. To enable the browser to run on Windows Vista, Microsoft shipped an update package that added the new capabilities to the older operating system.

The November preview will be the first version of Internet Explorer 10 to run on Windows 7 since Platform Preview 2 back in June of last year. Subsequent releases were restricted to Windows 8 only. Rather than shipping standalone previews of the browser engine, Microsoft used the Windows 8 Developer, Consumer, and Release Previews to serve double duty as Internet Explorer previews.

Unlike those two Platform Previews—which embedded the new rendering engine into a rudimentary container that lacked even a back button—the November release will be a full browser preview. It will include not just a rendering engine, but also a full browser user interface and shell.

30 Reader Comments

I am pleasantly surprised with the performance of IE10 on windows 8. In the past, every time I installed windows 7 on a computer, the first thing I'd do was to install chrome. I have been using IE10 on windows 8 for a while and didn't feel the need to install chrome so far.

The Win7 version of IE10 also includes a spell-checker, which isn't present in the Win8 version (because it is built into the OS). This and other differences probably required additional development time.

Isn't it wonderful that we're now living in a world where all four major browser are up to more than most of the tricks you throw at them - and the old ones that aren't are now finally in such a small minority that you can ignore them in most cases. When I think of how it was just a few years back compared to today, it's a much much better world for all of us - and esp. us that create websites. Basically I'm just happy that we are finally out of the mixed standards black hole. We need to remind ourselves - just like appreciating life when not having a headache.

Isn't it wonderful that we're now living in a world where all four major browser are up to more than most of the tricks you throw at them - and the old ones that aren't are now finally in such a small minority that you can ignore them in most cases. When I think of how it was just a few years back compared to today, it's a much much better world for all of us - and esp. us that create websites. Basically I'm just happy that we are finally out of the mixed standards black hole. We need to remind ourselves - just like appreciating life when not having a headache.

How lame it is, that Microsoft needs built-in OS services to make a semi-decent browser.In which areas is it superior to the other browsers, which are much more stand-alone?In other words, what justifies making IE10 a non-portable browser?(Other than a lame marketing trick to promote Win8.)

How lame it is, that Microsoft needs built-in OS services to make a semi-decent browser.In which areas is it superior to the other browsers, which are much more stand-alone?In other words, what justifies making IE10 a non-portable browser?(Other than a lame marketing trick to promote Win8.)

I think it makes sense that Microsoft uses some Windows 8 APIs to make IE 10 faster for example, and that it makes it difficult to port it to other OSes. Apple does the same with Safari.

How lame it is, that Microsoft needs built-in OS services to make a semi-decent browser.In which areas is it superior to the other browsers, which are much more stand-alone?In other words, what justifies making IE10 a non-portable browser?(Other than a lame marketing trick to promote Win8.)

I think it makes sense that Microsoft uses some Windows 8 APIs to make IE 10 faster for example, and that it makes it difficult to port it to other OSes. Apple does the same with Safari.

It's one thing to make use of the features available on the operating system you're installing the software on. It's another thing completely to continue to rely this late in the game on your dominant install base to prop up your built in browser.

The other kids travel around and get tested against each other, Microsoft can't play without home field advantage.

The fact that Microsoft shipped previews of IE 10 only on Windows 8 probably means that they only worried about what was required for it to run on Windows 8. It may not be too much of problem to get it running on Windows 7. But it will require some work and some testing. At best, it is clear that Microsoft has not completed Windows 8. The remaining Windows 8 work probably involves an all hands on deck effort. So it may not be clear when they will be able to spare the minds needed to get IE 10 running on Windows 7. I don't know why any Windows 7 users would care. I certainly don't. It appears obvious that reimagingation of Windows has included reimagination of all the processes involved in Windows development. So precedents may not mean much. Nor is it clear what hopes Microsoft has of actually getting desktop PC users to find some value in Windows Runtime applications. But, in the old Microsoft world it might have been exptected that at least some of the Windows Runtime would have been made available as an IE 10 plugin in the hopes of getting more rapid uptake of its applications by Windows 7 users. In any case, worries about Windows 7 are likely to be a very low priority until Microsoft has Windows 8 under control and that could be a while.

How lame it is, that Microsoft needs built-in OS services to make a semi-decent browser.In which areas is it superior to the other browsers, which are much more stand-alone?In other words, what justifies making IE10 a non-portable browser?(Other than a lame marketing trick to promote Win8.)

I think it makes sense that Microsoft uses some Windows 8 APIs to make IE 10 faster for example, and that it makes it difficult to port it to other OSes. Apple does the same with Safari.

Agreed. Today nobody whats a browser that only works. It has to work and has to be fast. Using new OS APIs seem to be a good way to accomplish that. The delay of the Win7 version will also lead reviewers to use the Win8 version, which might be faster since the APIs are optimised for it.

On the face of it, the delay is a little surprising. [...] The extra time required for Windows 7 may be due to underlying platform differences

It's not at all surprising to me.

Browser performance is starting to push the theoretical limit of the best possible performance current hardware - which means they are probably starting to make changes inside the kernel to increase performance. They probably brought as much of it as possible out of the kernel and into the browser for the Windows 7 build.

Isn't it wonderful that we're now living in a world where all four major browser are up to more than most of the tricks you throw at them - and the old ones that aren't are now finally in such a small minority that you can ignore them in most cases. When I think of how it was just a few years back compared to today, it's a much much better world for all of us - and esp. us that create websites. Basically I'm just happy that we are finally out of the mixed standards black hole. We need to remind ourselves - just like appreciating life when not having a headache.

XP and IE8 still exist.

Exactly, IE6 is thankfully almost dead. But IE8 and even IE7 are actually very prevalent. Until those go away IE will still be the bane of web developers everywhere. Even IE9 has pretty poor SVG support.

Checking awstats on apache right now for our site...

IE total 53%IE9 24.7%IE8 21.3%IE7 6.3%IE6 0.4%

FF 28.7%*Safari 8.3%Chrome 6.9%

Now admittedly our target demographic is older and less tech savvy, but IE versions less than 9 account for almost 30% of our traffic. Someday I hope I can share your enthusiasm for an IE or at least crappy-IE free future.

*Note our internal employees all use FF so likely IE usage of customers is probably 75%+

edit: On a side note, can someone tell me if IE10 still allows a compatibility mode crutch. That's another bane of the web-developer. Sections of our site can have issues if users are running in with compatibility mode on. Grrrr...

How lame it is, that Microsoft needs built-in OS services to make a semi-decent browser.In which areas is it superior to the other browsers, which are much more stand-alone?In other words, what justifies making IE10 a non-portable browser?(Other than a lame marketing trick to promote Win8.)

I think it makes sense that Microsoft uses some Windows 8 APIs to make IE 10 faster for example, and that it makes it difficult to port it to other OSes. Apple does the same with Safari.

It's one thing to make use of the features available on the operating system you're installing the software on. It's another thing completely to continue to rely this late in the game on your dominant install base to prop up your built in browser.

The other kids travel around and get tested against each other, Microsoft can't play without home field advantage.

Every new version of Windows brings to us another incompatible new browser.Yes, meanwhile the Chrome, Firefox, Opera, ETC just Work and put out new versions by working in the real World.Your post was a great post.

Does this mean I will no longer be able to feel morally superior to people who use IE?

I of course have the "big 3" installed on my computer, but I tend to use IE for daily browsing. I think on slower systems, especially XP systems, chrome makes sense because it tends to render quicker than IE8, but IE9 and the latest chrome and FF builds have been equal as far as page rendering times go.

IE9 smartfilter actually blocked a phishing scam site that Firefox and Chrome both navigated to without batting an eye.

So far IE10 has been even better than IE9 in terms of performance, but what I found found to be really, really nice, is the metro based IE10 browser. Yes it doesn't support plugins (although flash is built in and works on most major sites I have been to) but the damn thing is FAST. Pages render in there faster than chrome, firefox, or desktop IE on my windows 8 machine at home. I don't need plugins for 95% of my browsing, so it is the browser I use most of the time. Needs a few more features implemented into it, but I will give them some time to get those worked in.

How lame it is, that Microsoft needs built-in OS services to make a semi-decent browser.In which areas is it superior to the other browsers, which are much more stand-alone?In other words, what justifies making IE10 a non-portable browser?(Other than a lame marketing trick to promote Win8.)

I think it makes sense that Microsoft uses some Windows 8 APIs to make IE 10 faster for example, and that it makes it difficult to port it to other OSes. Apple does the same with Safari.

It's one thing to make use of the features available on the operating system you're installing the software on. It's another thing completely to continue to rely this late in the game on your dominant install base to prop up your built in browser.

The other kids travel around and get tested against each other, Microsoft can't play without home field advantage.

Every new version of Windows brings to us another incompatible new browser.Yes, meanwhile the Chrome, Firefox, Opera, ETC just Work and put out new versions by working in the real World.Your post was a great post.

What? IE8 runs under both XP and Windows Vista, IE9 runs under both Vista and Windows 7, and IE10 will support Windows 7 and Windows 8.

XP is twelve years old.Vista is five years old.

How long should Microsoft need to keep supporting older operating systems? if you have a five year-old version of OS X (i.e. Leopard), then the you can only install up to Safari 5.0.3 on it (which is two years old).

The other thing is that Microsoft uses the Trident Layout Engine (which is part of the operating system), to render the pages with IE). Lots of applications also use it (why not, it's part of the OS). Does Apple leverage APIs in OS X for Safari? Of course, because they aren't stupid... people care about the browser experience not whether you're leverage OS-specific APIs (and Sarafi is only available for the Mac and the PC (not version 6 so far), anyhow).

You don't need to worry about portability if your browser isn't portable.

I'm thinking that porting IE10 to Windows 7 should be a large undertaking, i.e. a larger undertaking than porting IE9 to Windows Vista. ( See what I did there? )

Reasoning behind it is because Windows 8 uses a built-in javascript engine. And though IE10 probably shares some fundamental building blocks from IE9, my guess is that the JS engine in IE10/Windows 8 differs greatly from that of IE9, simply because the engine is probably kernel space-based in Windows 8, and only IE-based in windows 7. If they did this, it was purely for performance-related reasons. In this way, reliability may not be as robust in practice. But since they decided to have their OS render real progra... apps using JS, and they needed it to work *as fast as possible*, that's what I would do... move the JS engine to kernel-space or as bare-metal hardware as I can get.

Since Windows 7 doesn't have an OS-wide JS engine, and by extension IE9, porting IE10 to Windows 7 could prove to be rather difficult. That's my guess as to why we probably won't have IE10 in Windows 7 until at least the end of the year.

IE8+ has Adblock (AKA Tracking Protection.) Unlike Adblock on Chrome, Tracking Protection is built in to IE, no add-on required.

IE's tracking protection is basically a large "Do Not Track" list if I'm not mistaken (though not the same as Do Not Track). Not even in the same ballpark as adblockers for Chrome or especially Firefox. In fact, it doesn't really "block" any ads at all if you've ever tried it.

People who use Adblockers for Chrome are lying to themselves, IMO. Think about what you're doing... a browser from an *advertising* company... you think they're going to give you everything you need to be able to implement a proper adblocker? I understand that Adblock for Chrome works decently, but it's the principle of the matter. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the way adblockers on Chrome work is they load all the content, including ads, then just filter and remove elements from the page. Not a horrible solution, actually. But the way it's done in Firefox is smarter. Adblock checks each element on the page before loading to see if it's an ad. When an element is flagged as an ad, it doesn't get downloaded, just omitted. That's a real ad blocker if you ask me.

IE8+ has Adblock (AKA Tracking Protection.) Unlike Adblock on Chrome, Tracking Protection is built in to IE, no add-on required.

IE's tracking protection is basically a large "Do Not Track" list if I'm not mistaken (though not the same as Do Not Track). Not even in the same ballpark as adblockers for Chrome or especially Firefox. In fact, it doesn't really "block" any ads at all if you've ever tried it.

Have you ever tried it? You can subscribe to EasyList and it does indeed block ads.

The Win7 version of IE10 also includes a spell-checker, which isn't present in the Win8 version (because it is built into the OS). This and other differences probably required additional development time.

It's nice to see they got a spell checker in IE finally. That's the primary reason why I switched to Firefox a few years ago. But since then I have really grown fond of Firefox's syncing. I have it sync bookmarks, addons, and preferences across all my machines! It will sync passwords and history too, but I don't use that.

It would be hard to go back to IE now without syncing. Just couldn't live without it now.

If you can't dream up a killer app to make folks upgrade, find other, mundane incentives.

edit:

I still remember upgrading from Win95 to Win98. I bought Deus Ex when it came out. Said it could run on Win95. It didn't. Called tech support, and they confirmed it. I then had incentive to upgrade to Win98. XP was such a huge market that nobody wanted to cut it off for Vista/7 only. I guess that trend is shifting now, though.

The Win7 version of IE10 also includes a spell-checker, which isn't present in the Win8 version (because it is built into the OS). This and other differences probably required additional development time.

It's nice to see they got a spell checker in IE finally. That's the primary reason why I switched to Firefox a few years ago. But since then I have really grown fond of Firefox's syncing. I have it sync bookmarks, addons, and preferences across all my machines! It will sync passwords and history too, but I don't use that.

It would be hard to go back to IE now without syncing. Just couldn't live without it now.

IE10 under Windows 8 syncs settings (options, open tabs, credentials, history, favorites) between computers if you login with the same Microsoft ID (Windows 8 syncs a lot of other stuff too which is really nice). I'm not sure if it applies to the desktop version as well. I believe it was possible to sync some items under previous versions as well using Live Mesh.

While I have enjoyed using internet explorer 10 (it is quite snappy), it is still not on par with web standards. WebGL is now a web standard and MS is actively refusing to implement it in IE. WebGL provides the functionality to provide fully interactive 3d websites (which currently are rare) to everybody anywhere. This is by far one big negative for IE, and is something that could slow down the adoption of a great new technology.

As a former devoted mac user for 20 years, I admire microsoft for their support for older systems. Apples relentless strive for profits and hardware innovation has left many Mac users stranded with relatively new hardware unable to upgrade their browser or os.

The forced obsolesence of perfectly capable laptops and desktops, especially during these times of economic hardship is a personal bugbear and Microsoft should be encouraged and not chastised for bringing ie10 to windows 7.

IE8+ has Adblock (AKA Tracking Protection.) Unlike Adblock on Chrome, Tracking Protection is built in to IE, no add-on required.

IE's tracking protection is basically a large "Do Not Track" list if I'm not mistaken (though not the same as Do Not Track). Not even in the same ballpark as adblockers for Chrome or especially Firefox. In fact, it doesn't really "block" any ads at all if you've ever tried it.

People who use Adblockers for Chrome are lying to themselves, IMO. Think about what you're doing... a browser from an *advertising* company... you think they're going to give you everything you need to be able to implement a proper adblocker? I understand that Adblock for Chrome works decently, but it's the principle of the matter. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the way adblockers on Chrome work is they load all the content, including ads, then just filter and remove elements from the page. Not a horrible solution, actually. But the way it's done in Firefox is smarter. Adblock checks each element on the page before loading to see if it's an ad. When an element is flagged as an ad, it doesn't get downloaded, just omitted. That's a real ad blocker if you ask me.

I recently switched to Chrome. I tried about 2 years ago and I couldn't stand how bad the adblockers were compared to Firefox, for exactly the reasons you mention. But today, I don't notice any major issues with Adblock on Chrome.

As for the method of implementation, I am not sure if that is true anymore. I can say that in the past Chrome would load the page, and then hide the ads, and I could actually see this happening as it rendered. But when I made the switch in the last few months, I observed that this was no longer the case. Consistently, my pages load faster than Firefox, I do not see any rendering glitches due to ads, and if there is some sort of inefficiency incurred from inferior Chrome programming hooks, it is invisibile and thus mostly irrelevant to me as a user.

It is possible that Chrome is downloading ads before blocking them, but if so, it is more than made up for by the speed of render. Only on a very slow connection would I be able to see much difference, anyway, I would think.

On the other hand, when using Adblock in Firefox, for the past 3 years I have been noticing insane memory leaks. I have run checks with 150 tabs in the recent Firefox builds (which were supposed to help with memory leaks due to addins), and I saw very little improvement. So I ask you, which implementation is worse? The one that provides limited hooks, or the one that allows unlimited memory leaks?

Honestly, I vastly prefer Firefox for almost all purposes, except speed and memory. I also prefer the single process per tab model of Chrome, and was saddened at the dropping of project Electrolysis.